It seems that no matter what medium people use for communication, spammers always find a way to make it a little less attractive. Junk mail, telemarketers, email spam and now even SMS spam have all likely been experienced by most at this point. But for those affected by the latter, there's at least a little piece of justice today thanks to a recent ruling against two SMS spammers in the UK.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) recently handed down a $700,000 fine to two spammers that were allegedly responsible for sending out millions of unsolicited SMS messages in the region. Gary McNeish and Christopher Niebel, operating under the business name Tetrus Telecoms, peddled their spam service with claims they could generate up to 800,000 text messages per day.
To accomplish this task, the duo used upwards of 70 SIM cards per day in order to send the messages. The ICO says they used a card reader with each SIM, sending out messages until its daily limit had been reached. As you can imagine, this was a very lucrative operation that reportedly brought in around $11,000 in revenue daily.
Unsurprisingly, the types of businesses that took them up on their offer aren't exactly the classiest around. BBC News says that many of their clients were claims companies trying to find individuals that had suffered an injury and were in need of a lawyer. Such companies collect information from victims and pass it along to attorneys for a fee.
McNeish and Niebel claim they did nothing wrong and had first obtained all of the necessary paperwork and consent to send the messages.